Bing Gives IE11 Users A Quick Look At The Top Search Result With New “Pre-Rendering” Feature

Bing released a new search feature today that “almost instantly” renders the associated page of the top search result when clicked. With the goal of providing a “faster end-to-end search experience,” the new “pre-rendering” feature is currently available only to IE11 users.

According to the announcement, this update follows a series of recent updates by Bing to minimize the search completion time, staring with Snapshot released in June of last year. The company rolled out its auto-suggest “Ghosting” feature in February, claiming it speeds up search time by 16 percent, reducing both clicks and typing time.

The kind of research that requires multiple queries and visiting multiple pages – either to find exactly the right one, or because the task itself requires additional digging in multiple locations.

Bing’s pre-rendering feature was designed to reduce the number of tasks needed to complete a “typical search” by using an IE11 pre-render tag that, “Automatically downloads and renders the top result page in the background” without wasting a user’s bandwidth and battery life.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.

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I’d like to know more about how this works, as the article doesn’t really explain it.

Is this like the portals’ CDNs that cache the most popular sites so that users can access them faster on local hubs than connecting directly to the actual servers? Similar to Google’s SiteSpeed caching service? In this instance, the tagged sites, or elements on the page, would be cached on Bing’s CDNs for pre-rendering in the background, if that’s how it works.

Based on the included image, it looks a little bit like the old Google Preview function that Google removed last year, which is a bit different. Of course, the image may also just be a representation of a schematic of what’s happening, but as the embedded pictures are so small and there are no links to the full-sized ones, it’s very hard to tell.

Perhaps Microsoft’s claim it takes care to not waste a user’s bandwidth and battery life is because they prerender the page text and CSS but not images or something more technical like that.

RedLeader

I think you’re on to something with the first part of the article
talking about IE 11’s pre-render feature – that does sound very much
like Chrome’s pre-render feature.

The part I’m hung up on though
is MS’s additional bit about having website users use a pre-render tag
on their site, which would give users direct control over whether their
site pre-renders in the SERPs or not. The current implementation on both
Chrome and IE is a brower-based function that essentially downloads the
page as you sit on the SERPs page, or when you are using auto complete,
as they have a very high statistical chance of that being THE page
you’re looking for.

In contrast, by tagging your site with the
tag, that’s allowing individual webmasters to pre-render their site in
your browser, which could either be a search function, or the tag merely
acts like a plugin trigger in the browser. This is pretty interesting.

I
found the mobile battery life/data limits point interesting, because
they’re depicting a desktop browser instead of a mobile browser, and
most people on the bleeding edge who build this into their sites will
probably be targeting desktop first, mobile second. Then, when you
consider that only 1 mobile OS representing less than 5% of the US
market uses IE, Windows Phone, (and probably not even IE 11) it seems
like a foot note announcement rather than some main benefit to tout. What an odd choice to lead their conversation with.

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